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WE NOW
KNOWRethinking
Cold War History
JOHN L E W I S G A D D I S
A CO UNCIL O N FOREIGN RELATIONS BOOK
Clarendon Press - Oxford \qq
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FOUR
Nuclear Weapons and the
Early Cold War
I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, andwhen morals catch u p perhaps there'll be no reason for any of t. .[ w e are only termites on a planet, a nd maybe when we bore too
deeply into the planet there'll [be] a reckoning-who knows?
Harry S. Truman, 16 July 1945'
Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves.
Joseph Stalin, 17 September 19462
T is a rare thing to see practices that have persisted since the beginning ofI ecorded time 'c'verse hemselves. And yet that is what began to happen, we
can now see, o n t Auyust 19-'5, the date the world learned simultaneously of
the existence and the lethality of nuclear weapons. Prior to that moment,
improvements in weaponry hitd, with very few exceptions, increased the costs
of fighting wars H thout reducing the propensity to d o so. From the invention
of axes and spear through bows and arrows, gunpowder and guns, warships,
tanks, submarines, high explo\ives, and aerial bombardment, each advance in
technology seemed only to widen the devastation and expand the toll of killed
and injured: efficiencv came to be measured i n rubble and corpses.3
By the beginning ot the twentieth century, weapons of war were themselves
contributing to the outbreak of wars. Without the naval arms rivalry of the pre-
1914 er a- an d particularly without Dreadnought and its successors-World War I
might never have t~a ppe ned .~Vithout U-boats and their use by th e Germans, the
United States might never ha t entered that conflict. Without the mobility that
made possible a Blitzkrieg,with its alluring promise of a quick and cheap victory,
Hitler might never have carried World War I1 beyond its "phony" stage. Without
a carrier-based air fort(*,Japan could hardly have attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, to realize that the most striking
innovation in the history of military technology has turned out to be a cause
of peace and not war. Over half a century has now passed since President
Truman's second atomic bomb devastated NagaJaki, on 9 August 1945. In the
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86 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 87
wake of that event, the great powers turned o ut tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons, most of which they aimed provocatively at one another. And yet at
no point di d those who controlled them see fit to use even a single such device
against anyo ne for any reason, despite the fact that t he Cold War provided any
number of occasions that would earlier have justified resort to the most soph-
isticated armaments available. Even if this taboo on nuclear use should some-
day break d ow n- a possibility the proliferationof nuclear technology will make
more and more likely over the years-the end of the Cold War has made it mostunlikely that a global conflagration, of the kind those who lived through the
Cold War so greatly feared, would be the result. The ancient principle tkat if
weapons are developed opportunit ies will be found to use them can, therefore,
no longer be taken for granted, and that is a shift of major proportions in th e
long and lamentable history of warfare.
What caused the shift was the quantum jump in the level of violence nuclear
weapons could produce. Their distance from conventional arms-to resort to a
football metaphor-was roughly that between getting a new kind of shoe allow-
ing better traction in tackling the ot her team's players, on th e one ha nd, and ,
on the other, developing a device capable of instantly destroying not only t he
other team but also one's own, to say nothing of the playing field, the specta-
tors, the stadium, the parking lot, and the television rights. It is no wonder
nuclear weapons, from the very beginning, gave rational people pause.sBut history has been full of irrational people: indeed, given the profound dif-
ferences historical, cultural, ideological and psychological backgrounds can
make in human behavior, one has to wonder whether there is any single stand-
ard for "rationality" in the first place. What seems most striking now about
nuclear weapons is not that they were developed or that people feared them. It
is rather that they forced, slowly but steadily, the emergence of a new kind of
rationality capable of transcending historical, cultural, ideological and psycho-
logical antagonisms of the kind that had always, in the past, given rise to great
power wars.
That new rationality grew out of the simple realization that as weapons
become more devastating they becoi ie less usable.6 But that is a revolutionary
idea in the history of warfare, implying as it does a severanceof the link between
advances in armaments and the purposes to which they are put. It helps to
account for why the ultimate instrument of war became, during the Cold War
at least, the ultimate inducement t o peace.
I
Nuclear weapons were developed in a traditional way, but in an untraditional
place. The way was traditional because scientific advances-particularly the dis-
coveryof atomic fission in the late 1930s- coincided with anpp portu nity to use
them, which was the onset of World War 11: it was not t he first time the prospect
of a war had stimulated the development of technologies with which to fight it.
The place, though , was unexpected. Despite its impressive industrial capabili-
ties and deeply-rooted military traditions, the United States through most of its
history had hardly led the world in developing new war-fighting technologies.
Americans had tended to imitate rather th an to originate weaponry, and during
t j e 1920s and 1930s they barely managed to main tain functional professional
forces at any level.' The army he commanded was still training with horses and
mules when in October 1941 the President of the United States authorized acrash program, in collaboration with British and Canadian allies, to produce an
atomic bomb.8
Without Franklin D. Roosevelt's particular combination of audacity, imagi-
nation, and chi lling realism, evbnts might have taken a different course: it is not
at all clear that a more conventional chief executive would have committed
immense resources to so unproven a technology at such a critical time. But
Roosevelt had decided, long before most of his countrymen, that Hitler's
Germany threatened American security in the most fundamental way. To
counter that danger he was prepared, while remaining officially neutral, to
sanction a wide range of extraordinary measures, of which th e decision to build
the bomb was only Economics and geography left allies little choice but
to go along: the United States alone possessed underused industrial facilities
allowing the necessary research, development, and production without signifi-cant risk of enemy attack.Io
In a curious way, the strengths of democratic institutions contributed t o this
outcome. An innovative mix of public and private educational funding had
made several American universities, by the 1930s, competitive with their
European counterparts in the rapidly-evolving field of nuclear physics.
Meanwhile the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Ge rma ny -a costly indulgence onHitler's part-quickly lost him, by way of emigration to those institutions,
many of Europe's best physicists.l* The priorities of survival und ambition, of
science and morality, coincided for these individuals in the most compelling
manner, with a n atomic bomb th e ultimate result. Nor did the German scien-
tists who stayed behind d o all they might have to provide their Fuhrer with an
equivalent instrument, perhaps for fear of what the combination of absolute
evil with absolute power might mean.I2
Having acquired this awesome weapon, the United States used it against
Japan for a slmple and straightforward reason: to achieve victory as quickly, as
decisively, and as economically as possible. Had the atomic bom b been ready in
time, Germany might well have been the first target: neither the British nor the
Americans had shown inhibit ions abou t flattening that country's cities with
conventional weaponry.13 Hiroshimi and Nagasaki were destroyed, the latter
probably unnecessarily, to shock 1he Japanese into surrendering and thereby to
avoid the casua lties -on both sides and whatever their extent-that might
occur in forcinglapm's defeat by more orthodox means." "Let there be no mis-
take about it," Truman later recalled. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon
and never had any doubt that it should be used."Is
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88 WeN owK now Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 89
will do s0."20 Subsequently, there was occasional talk of initiating an attack onth e USSR for the purpose of knocking out its nuclear facilities, but always in th econtext of what might happen after an effort at international control through
the United N ations had failed, or in a situation in which t he Soviet Union hadalready accumulated sufficient capabilities to allow an attack on the UnitedState s or its allies.*' As late as 1948 , President Tru man c ould still wonder
whether atomic weapons would be available for any kind of offensive militaryoperations "because the people of the United States might not at the time per-
mit their use for a ggressive purposes."22Then there was a more practical difficulty: American officials were at n o point
certain, prior to 1950, that they could actually win a preventive war against theSoviet Union if they were to start one. The production of atomic weapons hadproceeded at w hat seems in retrospect a remarkably relaxed pace, so that at the
time he proclaimed t he Truman Doctrine in March 1947, the President under-
stood there to be only fourteen bombs in the American arsenaLZ3When the
Berlin blockade began in the spring of 1948 only fifty unwieldy and unassem-
bled weapons were available, and just over thirty B-29s equipped to carrythem.24 It was not at all clear how many targets would have t o be hit or wherethey all were: the best intelligence on the USSR came from German aerialphotographs taken early in World War 11, and In some instances from pre-war
and even pre-1917 maps.2s The Air Force itself concluded in 1949 that t hedestruction of some seventy Soviet cities would not, "per se, bring about thecapitulation, destroy the roots of Communism, or critically weaken the pow er
of the Soviet leadership to dom inate the people." M eanwhile, "the capability of
Soviet armed forces to adv ance rapidly int o selected areas of Western Europe,
th e Middle F'ist, an d th e Far East would n ot serio usly be impaired.'IZ6And if one
could achiei e victory, what th en? "Conquering the R ussians is one thing,"Secretaryof Defense James Forrestal pointed out, "and finding what t o do withthem afterward is an entirely different pr0blern."2~
If preventive war was impossible, though, atomic diplomacy might not be.Could the United States use the fact of exclusive possession t o coerce the Soviet
Union an d othe r potential adversaries into cooperation? During the summer of
1945 Secretary o f War Henry L. Stirnson had briefly advocated withholding
information about th e bom b until th e USSR transformed itself into a constitu-tional democracy; and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes definitely expected theAmerican monopoly to induce the Russians into making diplomatic conces-
sions.= President Truman himself appeared to endorse such unilateralism whe nhe warned, i n his first radio address after Nagasaki, that "[tlhe a tomic bom b istoo dangerous t o be loose in a lawless world," hence the United States, GreatBritain, and Canada, "who have the secret of its production, do not intend to
reveal that secret until th e means have been found t o control the bom b so as toprotect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruc-tion."z9
What is remarkable about these attitudes is not th at they existed but howquickly they were given up. Within weeks of Hiroshima American officials had
Military decisions rarely take place in geopolitical vacuums, though, and thisone, was no exception. It did indeed occur to Truman and his advisers thatdemonstrating t he atomic bomb's effectiveness would impress, perhaps evenintimidate the Soviet Union: given their already strained relationship withMoscow, it would have been surprising if such thou ghts had nor surfaced.16 A
few of the scientists who developed the bom b went even further: they favored
using it as a way of frightening their o wn government, the Russians, and the restof the world into a collective abhorrence of future war.17 But these justific ationswere of secondary, not determining, importance in t he summer of 1945. It ha s
never been easy to think calmly or systematically abou t how on e is fighting awar while one is fighting it. Nuclear weapons would eventually force w3rriorsand statesmen alike into such self-reflection; but World War I1 was the last great
conflict to be settled within th e ancient paradigm that saw no gap between th eutility an d destructiveness of weaponry.18 It that conte xt, the de cision to use
the atomic bom b made sense.
\
I1
Postwar uses, though, were something else again: here th e actions the UnitedStates took failed to fit traditional patte rns of great power behavio r. To ee thispoint, assume counterfactually that a hypothetical C ountry X had gained exclu-
sive control over what seemed, at first glance, to be an "absolute" weapon.19Would one not expect X, as a matter of the highest national priority and at all
costs, to try to keep its rival Y nd an y other potential rivals from eyer getting
the device? Would one not anticipate that X would use its monopoly, while itexisted, to pressure and if necessary coerce other na tions in to following itswishes? Would one not predict that X would undertake the immediate mass
production of its new weapon, with a view to ensuring contin uing superiorityeven if monopoly w ere no longer possible? And would on e not regard X as verylikely, if it should ever get in to an other military conflict at whatever level, to useits new instrument of warfare to ensure victory as long as there was n o realistic
prospect of retaliation by Y or anyo ne else? Abstraction suggests that all of thesethings should have happened during the period in which the United States
enjoyed an effective nuclear monopoly. The fact th at i n reality noneof them didrequires explanation.
Why did the United States not resort to preventive war to keep the SovietUnion or anyo ne else from ever developing nuclear w eapons? The Joint Chiefsof Staff did briefly consider, immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, howmilitary action might bring about a permanent atomic monopoly; but theseideas went nowhere. One reason had to do with the nation's image of itselfAmericans did not start wars. "I t might be desirable to strike th e first blow,"Pentagon planner General George A. Lincoln acknow1edged)n September 1945,but "it is not politically feasible under our system to do so or to state that we
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90 WeNowKnow
abandoned.the idea that an atomic monopoly could become a usable instru-
ment of diplomacy, shifting instead to an immediate search for international
control. This happened for several reasons. Molotov had proven more difficult
to deal with, not less, at the first pobtwar foreign ministers’ conference, held in
London in September 1945, hereby shaking the self-confidenceof those who
had hoped the bomb would be a latter-day version of Theodore Roosevelt’s “big
stick.”30 “The joint development of this discovery with th e UK and Canada
must appear to the Soviet Union to be unanswerable evidence of an Anglo-American combination against them,” Under-Secretaryof State Dean Acheson
warned later that month. “It is impossible that a government as powerful and
power conscious as the Soviet Government could fail to react vigorousl’y to this-
situation.”31
There could be no assurance, moreover, that the Russians would not them-
selves build a bomb. Their scientists understood the principles well enough, and
the Americans had obligingly confirmed many of them shortly after Hiroshima
by publishing their own detailed account of how they had accomplished the
feat.32 The Manhattan Project had been a multinationa l effort, a fact that dis-
couraged attempts to think about its product as a purely American pro ble m-o r
opportunity. The President and his advisers therefore embarked, with support
from the British and the Canadians, upon an ambitious effort to place all atomic
weapons under t he authority of t&.United Nations: the United States woulddeny the bomb to potential adversaries by ultimately-although under safe-
guards of its own desig n-den ying it t o itself.
The international control scheme the Americans put forward in the spring of
1946-first drafted by Acheson and future Atomic Energy Commission chair-
man David E. Lilienthal in cooperation with th e atomic scientists, and t hen
modified by the American spokesman at the United Nations, Bernard Baruch-
reflected widely-held but transitory attitudes: awe at the new kind of warfare the
United States had brought inio existence together with a determination to find
a new approach to world politics to go with it; faith in the United Nations and
in the international legal procedures it would presumably rely upon; deference
to the advice of the scientists who had built the bomb; the lingering hope of
avoiding a hostile relationship with Moscow. These were cautious proposals,
tilted toward maintaining the American monopoly as long as possible, a fact the
Russians were quick to point out. But they were not simply gestures concealing
a search forpermanent nuclear hegemony. One ought n ot t o minimize the guilt
American leaders felt, if only subconsciously, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or
the sense of responsibility-manifesting itself as a characteristic effort at reform
and perhaps redemption-they drew from what they had done.33
What these officials did no t feel was the need to undertake serious negotia-
tions with the Soviet Union to determine its price for accepting international
control. TheBaruch Plan reflected a domestic compromise, not a n international
one. It balanced what th e atomic scientists insisted on offering against what th e
military and a skeptical Congress were prepared to relinquish. The Americans
presented it, as a consequence, on a “take it or leave it” basis, and by t he begin-
Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 91
ning of 1947 Stalin had chosen t he latter option.34 He thus left the Truman
administration few alternatives but to make whatever it could of its atomic
monopoly before the Russians’ own bomb development project, now assumed
to be underway, brought it to an end.
Having given up on atomic diplomacy when they initiated the search for
internatio nal control, the President and his advisers now found it difficult to
return to it. Committed to the principle of civilian control over the military,
Truman insisted on denying the Pentagon the most basic information abouthow many atomic bombs were available, or on what their effects would be if
employed. He did not, as he put it, want to have “some dashing lieutenant
colonel decide when would be the proper time to dro p one.”35 There could be
little coordination, then, between contingency plans for war with the Soviet
Union and the weapons available with which to fight it; nor was there any
assurance, if war came, tha t Truman would author ize use of these weapons in
the first It was almost as if the President-whose own atti tude toward
nuclear weapons was more ambivalent than he wanted it to appear to be3’-
considered it as important to keep his own military guessing as it was to have
the Russians do the same. Devising strategies to impress Moscow, under such
constraints, was no easy matter.
These difficulties became clear in April 1948,when Winston Churchill sug-
gested giving Stalin the choice of either abandoning Berlin and eastern
Germany, or having his cities razed. The former Prime Minister’s thoughts on
how to handle t he Soviet Union had co mmanded great respect in Washington,
if not universal assent, when put forward in his famous March 1946 “Iron
Curtain” speech. But this new proposal gained n o greater attention wit hin the
Truman administration than had a similar one from the eccentric British
philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had advocated using “any degreeof pressure
that may be necessary . . . t01 secure Russian acquiescence.” “You know better
than I the practical infirmities in [Churchill’s] suggestion,” Ambassador Lewis
Douglas cabled Under SecretaryofState Robert Lovett, and that was the end ofit.38
Truman did, to be sure, approve the ostentatious deployment of B-29s o
British bases during th e Berlin blockade later th at summer.3g But there was less
to this initiative than met the eye, and certainly much less than what
Chu rch ill -or Russell-had in mind. No overt threats to use atomic bombs
accompanied it, and the bombers sent carried no such weapons, a fact the
Russians could easily have determined given th e distinctive external appearance
of atomic-capable B-29s, as well as the presence of the Soviet spy Donald
Macleanon the joint Anglo-American committee within whlch informat ion on
atomic weapons was exchanged.m The B-29maneuver was a hasty imprqvisa-
tion, a quick fix intende d to compensate for another problem Truman’s empha-
sis on civilian priorities had created: the weakness of American conventional
forces, brought a bout by th e extraordinarily tight budgets within which t he
Resident had forced the Pentagon to ~pera te .~’
The administration therefore left itself little choice but to rely upon its atomic
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92 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons and the Ear/y Cold War 93
was characteristically suspicious:‘‘I do not believe this. And I advise you not to
believe that it is possible to win a war using some kind of chemical element that
no one has seen. Doesn’t this seem like pure propaganda t o you? Done deliber-
ately to distract our scientists from work on new kinds of weapons for the
army?”4h
Further reports accumulated, though, not just from spies In Britain but from
Soviet agents who had cultivated contacts with American physicists, among
them J. Robert Oppenheimer, soon to become director of the ManhattanProject. How much substantive nformation these efforts yielded-if any at all-
is still not clear, but the fact that they took place suggests continuing interest
on Beria’s part, whatever Stalin’s attitude.” Meanwhile, more useful intelli-
gence was beginning to flow from Klaus Fuchs, a German emigr6 scientist who
had joined the British project and would subsequently move to Los Alamos.‘a
Stalin refused to take even these reports seriously, though, until another of
those quirky events occurred-like Vernadsky’s newspaper clipping-that
sometimes alter the course of history. A young Soviet physicist, Georgii Rerov,
looking for citations to his own work In British and American journals, noticed
that references to nuclear physics were no longer appearing in them. Finding
his supervisors uninterested in this pattern, he took the risky step of writing
directly to Stalin in April 1942, suggesting that if the allies were going to such
lengths to conceal such research, it must be important.49 Invisible moleculesmay have been difficult to understand but invisible information was not: Stalin
immediately got the point. Perversely, Anglo-American attempts to ensure the
Manhattan Project’s security were what alerted him to its significance.
“Reportedly he White House has decided to allocate a large sum to a secret
atomic bomb development project,” the NKVD cabled its agents in New York,
London, and Berlin in June, 1942. “Relevant research and development is
already in progress n Great Britain and Germany. .. Please take whatever mea-
sures you think fit to obtain information on . . . he theoretical and practical
aspectsof the atomic bomb projects,” and on “the likely changes in the future
policies of the USA, Britain, and Germany in connection with the development
of the atomic bomb.”S0What is interesting about this sequence of events is that
it was primarily concern about the British and Americans, and only to a lesserextent the Germans, that led Stalin to authorize this intensification of esplon-
age.51 It appears to have made n o difference to him that two of the nations
against whom he acted were wartime allies, while only one was an adversary.
“You are politically naive,” he is said to have told a senior Soviet scientist who
in October 1942 suggested simply asking Roosevelt and Churchill about the
bomb, “if you think that they would share information about the weapons that
will dominate the world in the future.”52
Whether Stalin was right about that is an interesting question. Security was
an obvious priority in the Manhattan Project, but it focused chieflyon he dan-
ger of Germnrt espionage; the po%sibility hat Soviet penetration might be the
more serious problem did no t fully dawnon he Americans until after the w a ~ . ~ 3
The atomic physicists had by no means abandoned their conviction that
monopoly’as a means of deterring the Russians. That capability was by no
means insignificant. It is possible that without it the Americans would never
have run the risks involved in defending Berlin, encouraging the formation of
an independent West German state, and creating the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.42 But capability was not strategy. Dependence on nuclear
weapons grew more out of desperation than deliberate preference. Truman and
those around him had not yet sorted out the competing priorities of public
opinion, the domestic economy, constitutionality, morality, and the national-security state. Their failure to do so, in turn, impeded efforts to think systemat-
ically about how one might exploit the American nuclear advantage.-Washington officials did not feel self-confident during the summer and fallo?
1948. If they ran risks, it was because they thought it riskier not to do so. That
was because the American atomic monopoly had not deterred Stalin from run-
ning risks of his own: ndeed, it may even have encouragedhim to do so.
I11
The United States built its atomic bomb because it perceived, wrongly as it
turned out, that Hitler might have a similar priority. The Soviet Union began
work on ts bomb because it perceived, quite rightly, that the United States was
already constructing one. Roosevelt made his decision to go ahead i n October
1941 with a potential but highly probable adversary, Nizi Germany, in mind.
When Stalin authorized a research project-not yet a bomb-the following
year, he too had a potential but probable adversary in mind: for the moment,
though, it was an ally.
Soviet authorities first learned that atomic weapons might be possible, it now
appears, from the New York Times. Hoping to alert the White House to the mil-
itary potential of atomic fission, science correspondent William Laurence pub-
lished a story on 5 May 1940, claimingerroneously-that the Germans wf re
extracting uranium-235 for use in bombs. Roosevelt, already aware of fission
research, paid no attention; but as it happened Yale historian George Vernadskysent the clipping to his father, the Russian mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky,
who passed it on to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. That organization, n turn,
set up a Uranium Commission which quickly established the probable feasibil-
ity of a chain reaction and called for a systematic effort to locate uranium
deposits throughout the USSR.43
The German invasion in June 1941 delayed this search; it also diverted Soviet
physicists into work that seemed more likely to produce immediate military
benefit^.^' But by this time the spies Soviet intelligence had recruited at,
Cambridge University during the 1930s had begun monitoring British nuclear
research, and one of them-probably John Cairncross-reported tha t London
and Washington were collaborating to build a uranium bomb. NKVD chiefLavrenti Beria duly informed his Stalin’s initial reaction, by one account,
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94 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons an d the Early Cold War 95
Leninist doctrine assumed the venality of capitalists as well as their enmity, the
Soviet government even attempted, in 1943, to purchase sufficient uranium
from the United States to construct an atomic pile similar to the one that had
produced the first chain reaction at the University of Chicago a few months
earlier-this even as efforts to crack the secrets of the Manhattan Project were
_continuingat full pace. The Americans, by this time dimly aware of Soviet espi-
onage but worried that a refusal to sell might only confirm its findings, did pro-
vide some of the requested commodity, although in much smaller quantities
than the Russians had requested.62 The uranium shortage persisted until the
Red Army moved into Czechoslovakia and eastern Germany, where known s u p
plies were available.63
The more serious reason for the absence of an all-out Soviet effort was that
Kremlin leaders were slow to understand what atomic weapons could actually
do. Molotov, to whom Stalin had assigned the initial responsibility for nuclear
research, appears to have had lit tle sense of what it was all about. Beria, who
took over early in 1945, saw the implications more clearly, but even he never
fully trusted the intelligence reports his agents inside the Manhattan Project
provided: "if this is disinformation," he threatened one of his subordinates, 1'11
put you all in the cellar."64
When President Truman at last did tell Stalin about the atomic bomb at the
Potsdam Conference on 24 July 1945, shortly after the first test in the NewMexico desert, it was hardly a surprise to the Soviet leader: he had known about
the possibility of such a weapon long before Truman had.65 He said only tha t
he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against the Japanese. Stalin
reacted more revealingly immediately afterwards: "Truman is trying to exert
pressure, to dominate," he told Beria:
His attitude is particularly aggressive toward the Soviet Union. Of course, the factorof the atomic bomb [is] working for Truman. . But a policyof blackmail and intim-idation is unacceptable to us.We therefore gave no grounds for thinking that any-thing could intimidate us. Lavrentiy, we should not allow any other country to havea decisive superiority over us. Tell Comrade Kurchatov that he has to hurry with hisparcel. And ask him what our scientists need to accelerate work."
When Stalin later berated Kurchatov for not having advanced bomb dewlop-
ment faster, the scientist excused himself by invoking all that the Soviet Unionhad been through during the war: "So much has been destroyed, so many
people have died. The country is on starvation rations, there is not enough of
anything."Stalin was unmoved. "If a child does not cry," he replied, "the mother does
not understand what he needs. Ask for anything you like. You will not be
turned He then dangled material inducements before the astonished
scientist: "we can always make it possible for several thousand persons to live
well, and . . etter than very well, with their owndachas, so that they can relax,and with their own cars." It was "not worth spending time and effort on small-
scale work, rather, it is necessary to conduct the work broadly, on a Russian
scale, and . . n this regard, utmost assistance will be provided."m
science should be an open, international, and elite enterprise, even as they
accommodated themselves uneasily to the censorship, compartmentalization,
and restrictions on movement the United States government required. The
resulting tension produced prophetic insights into the need for the interna-
tional control of atomic weapons, as well a s alternative visions of a long and
costly arms race, possibly even a cataclysmic future ~ a r . ~ 4rom this point of
view, telling the Russians about the bomb could seem the right thing to do. "I
can see that there might be some arguments for doing that," Oppenheimer con-ceded in 1943;but he added-referring to Soviet espionage efforts-"I don' t like
Roosevelt did not immediately rule out informing the Soviet Union. He took
seriously the Danish physicist Niels Bohr's recommendations to this effect dur-
ing the spring and summer of 1944, despite an earlier agreement with Churchill
to withhold such information from "third parties except by mutual consent."
We may never know why, in September, F.D.R. finally yielded t o Churchill's
objections and rejected Bohr's advice. The Warsaw uprising was fresh in the
President's mind, though, and his own Soviet experts were now warning against
trusting Moscow on far less consequential matte) han the atomic bomb.56 He
had also known, for at least a year, that the Russians were attempting to steal its
secrets.57 What is surprising in retrospect is not that Roosevelt rejected
cooperation with the USSR in developing this weapon, but rather that heresponded as calmly as he did to evidenceof Soviet espionage.
The reason is not likely to have been, as some Soviet sources have suggested,
that key administration officials and atomic scientists were passing sensitive
information to the Russians on their The more plausible explanation is
that war was still to be won, the USSR was still an invaluable ally, and as such it
seemed entitled to every benefit of the doubt despite its leader's less than trust-
fu l attitude. The Manhattan Project was itself unknown to all but a ti1 ~yminor-
ity of Americans; in another perverse twist, more vigorous efforts to prevent
Soviet agents from stealing its secrets might have compromised its secrecy. And,
of course, no one in the United States at the time-neither the scientistsnor the
diplomats nor top officials of the Roosevelt administration-knew what we
know now and what Stalin must have known then: that there was going to be
a Cold War.
Espionage appears to have been of greater assistance to the Soviet bomb
development project than we had once th0ught.~9 s early asMarch 1943, lgor
V.Kurchatov, Oppenheimer's Russian counterpart, was assessing the informa-
tion it yielded as having "huge, inestimable, significance or our state and sci-
ence." No t only did spying confirm the importanceof the work going on in the
West; it also made it possible "to bypass many very labor-intensive phases of
working out the problem and to learn about new scientific and technical ways
of solving it."- "It was a very good intelligence operation by our Chekists,"
Molotov recalled years afterwards. "Theyneatly stole just what we needed."61
Even so, progress was slow while the war was goingon.One problem was that
there were few known sources of uranium within the USSR. Perhaps because
the idea of having it moved out the back door."Ss -
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96 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 97
performance. “The failure of the conference,” he commented , “will be Byrnes’s
failure, and we should not grieve over t l i i ~ . ” ~ ~ut when Molotov repeated his
tactics at the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in December, even Stalin
thought he had gone too far: “This is too serious a matter to joke about,” he
insisted in front of the visiting American and British delegations. “We must
now work together to see that this great inv ention is used for peaceful ends.”m
The Americans and British had come t o Moscow to seek Soviet participation
in a United Nations commission on the international control of atomic
energy-the first stage in what would become the Acheson-Lilienthal an d later
the Baruch Plan. Some Soviet officials regarded the visit as evidence that their
tough line on the bomb had already paid off;8o perhaps for that reason the
Soviet Union did agree to participate in the United Nations discussions. A con-
sensus on international control was never close, though, because both
American plans required establishing a powerful international agency that
would control all facilities for producing atomic weapons before the United
States would relinquish its monopoly. The Soviet position provided for the
immediate destruction of existing weapons with no mechanisms t o prevent
other states from building them.81 Dimitri Skobel’tsyn, a scientist on the Soviet
delegation, summarized the situation for Beria and Molotov in October 1946:
If the Baruch plan is accepted, then every independent activity in the development
of atomic productim in countries which have signed the agreement has to be cur-tailed and handed over to an international (in reality, probably, an American) organ-ization. This international organization would then . . . proceed to control our
resources. We reject such help and are determined to carry out by ou r own efforts all
the research and preparatory work necessary for setting up atomic production in our
country, as America did in the yearsof the war.8z
When Molotov subsequently told the United Nations that the Soviet Union
would soon have an atomic bomb ”and other things,” even his boss was
impressed. “Well, tha t was strong stuff,” Stalin commented. “We still had noth-
ing,” Molotov acknowledged, “but I was up to date on the matter.”83
Whatever his foreign minister said in public, Stalin now had a better sense of
what atomic weapons could do. Soviet representatives toured Hiroshima two
weeks after the atomic bombing, an d sen t back detailed reportsof the devasta-
tion they had witnessed. At the invitat ion of th e United States, Soviet scientistsalso attended the first postwar atomic bomb tests, conducted on Bikini Atoll in
1946.84Worried that the Americans might someday try to attack them, Stalin
insisted that Soviet bomb production facilities be well hidden, often in under-
ground bunkers and in one instance even under a lake.85 “That is a powerful
thing, power-ful!” he admitted to Milovan Djilas in 1948, by which time th e
Soviet Union had already made considerable progress toward constructing its
own bomb.86 As late as July 1949)only weeks before th e first Soviet test and with
the weapon very much on his mind, Stalin was warning Liu Shaoqi’s visiting
delegation that “[ilf we, the leaders, undertake [war], the Russian people would
not understand us. Moreover, they could chase us away. For underestimating all
the wartime a nd postwar efforts and suffering. For taking it too lightly.”87
The American atomic bomb had elevated Soviet physics from invisible mole-
cules to a matter of stale security, and as ilconsequence Soviet physicists gained
the freedom to follow the Western example espionage had given them. In con-
trast to his disastrous iiiterfcrence with Soviet genetics, Stalin imposed n o ideo-
logical guidance: Kurchatov did not become Lysenko. The physicists, in turn,
made the most of the opportunity; so much so, indeed, that they would need
no espionage-supplied model when they turned their skills, as they soon did, to
the construction of a hydrogen bomb.6g Was it not dangerous to grant the
atomic scientists so much physical and intellectual autonomy, Beria at one
poin t asked. “Leave them in peace,” his boss-now in a less nurt urin g mood-
replied. “We can always shoot them later.“70
IV
“Hiroshima has shaken the whole world,” Stalin admitted t o his physicists a few
days after the event. “The balance has been broken. Build the bomb-it will
remove the great danger from The danger Stalin foresaw was not tha t of
direct attack. Despite a sense of frustration, even shock, that the United States
had forged so far ahead in this new category of weaponry, there was n o imme-diate concern in Moscow that the Americans would actually use their atomic
bombs against the USSR. Stalin appears t o have derived this reassurance, how-
ever, more from spy reports that confirmed quite accurately the t iny nu mber of
bombs in the American arsenal than from charitable judgments about the
American ch ar ac te ~~ z
More significant was the threat of psychological intimidation. “The bombs
dropped o n Japan were not aimed at Japan but rather at the Soviet Union,”
Molotov recalled. “They said, bear in mind you don‘t have an atomic bomb a nd
we do, and th is is what the consequences will be like if you make a wrong
rn0ve!“~3 talin himself, according to Andrei Gromyko, expected the Americans
and t he British to use their monopoly “ to force us to accept their plans on ques-
tions affecting Europe and the world. Well, that’s not going to happen.”74Nor
would Stalin wait for the Americans to try: he quickly embarked upon a strat-
egy designed to counter the practice of atomic diplomacy before the Truman
administration had even attempted it.7S
The Soviet government took th e official position tha t the atomic b omb had
made no difference at all in the postwar balance of power. This was why
Molotov had gone ou t of his way at t he September 1945 London foreign min-
isters’ conference to show his disdain for th e new weapon, to the point of mak-
ing heavy-handed jokes about it at the expense of Secretary of State Bymes.
“Here’s to the Atom Bomb,” he toasted at one point, in a sodden attempt to
spook the Americans: “We’ve got it .”76As th e pugnacious Foreign Minister later
acknowledged: “We had to set a tone, to reply in a way that would make our
people feel more or less c~nf iden t . ”~ ~talin had n o qualms about Molotov’s
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98 WeNowKnow Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 99
unlikely event that it should choose to d o so.95The American nuclear arsenalwould soon expand exponentially; but this happened only after-and partlybecause-the American nuclear monopoly no longer existed. Timing meansquite a great deal in strategy, and the spies allowed Stalin to calculate it with
unusual precision.4. It helped as well that Stalin had a clearer idea than the Americans of what
might constitute atom ic diplomacy. An old hand at intimidatidg others, he sawthe danger of appearing to be intimidated himself well before Truman and hisadvisers--obviously less experienced in this area-had worked out ways toaccomplish that objective. Washington officialsnever transformed their atomic
monopoly into an effective instrument of peacetime coercion. Had the rolesbeen reversed, it is unlikely that Stalin would have had such difficulties.
All of this raises, then, a n interesting question: did t he fact tha t th e world’s
first nuclear state was also a democratic state make a difference? It obviously did
when it came to espionage. The scale of Soviet operations in this area was
remarkable, but so too was the trust the American, British, and Ca nadian gov-
ernments extended to their own citizens-and to their wartime ally-on so
secret a matter.96 Pressures from allies, the atomic scientists, and public opinionpushed the Truman administration into seeking international control, leavingit unclear forover a year whether the United States could even cou nt on retain-
ing atomic bombs i nto th e postwar era.97 After that po int had been resolved,Truman’s staunchly literal commitment to the principle of civilian supremacydiscouraged exploration of how atomic bombs might affect the relationshipbetween force and diplomacy. So too did his insistence on so closely restrictinginformation about the number and capabilities of these weapons that Sovietintelligence probably knew more about them t han Pentagon planners did. Nor
did self-images of appropriate behavior go away: if democracies did not startwars, neither did they find it easy, in the absence of blatant provocation, to
threaten them.We should not make too much of this argument, though, because one char-
acteristic of nuclear weapons themselves, whether the y exist within democra-
cies or autocracies, was beginning to come in to play at this point: it was easy tothink of reasons why one might need such instruments when one did not yet
have them, but it was difficult to know just what to d o with them once on e gotthem. Stalin, as well as Truman , would soon ace this problem.
As the time for the test approached, Stalin worried about not having an extrabom b in reserve: “Wha t if [th e Americ ans] press on with their atom ic bombsand we have not hing to co ntain the m?” Could the scientists not divide th e firstbomb into two, just in case? When they explained th at smaller bombs wouldlack the critical mass to sustain a chain reaction, Stalin according to oneaccount, tried to m ake sense of the science in ideological terms: “Critical mass. . critical mass. It is also a d ialectical notion!”88 The Soviet leader’s nervous-ness probably explains his otherwise puzzling decision not to an noun ce th e suc-
cessful experiment, conducted o n 29 August 1949, so that it was left to th eAmericans, whose air-sampling techniques quickly picked up evidence tha t an
atomi c explosion had oc curred inside th e USSR, to reveal the ne ws three‘weekslater.89 “Did it look like th e American one?” Beria, wh o witnessed th e test,
demanded excitedly: ”Very much alike? We didn’t screw it up? Kurchatov isn’tpulling our leg, is he?”w
Stalin had chosen to gamble--correctly as it turned out-that his scientists
could provide him with his own atomic bomb, and therefore the basis for adeterrent capability, before the United States could accumulate enough
weapons to be confident of defeating the Soviet Union by launching a preven-
tive w ar.91 A key aspect of this strategy was to show no fear, we n thou gh fearsthere surely were. Diplomacy therefore had to be conduc ted, and for th e most
part was, as if th e American atomic bom b did not exist: this was the p ointof
Stalin’s best known pronounce ment on such w eapons, which was that theywere “mea nt to frighten those with weak nerves.”92 He was in a position toknow.
The only moments at which th e Russians may have moderated their actionsou t of concern for American nuclear capabilities were the 1948 Berlin blockade
crisis and Stalin’s attempt to discourage Ma0 Zedong early in 1949 from cross-ing the Yangtze; but even in these instances th e cause and effect relationshipwas hardly conclusive. “I t is difficult to deduce any evidence that this mono p-
oly on our part influenced Soviet polic y. . .or abated its aggressiveness,” theSoviet expert Charles E. Bohlen concluded the following year.93 Decades later,historian David Holloway assessed th e impact of the American atomic bomb in
only slightly different terms: “It probably made the Soviet Union more
restrained i n its use of force, for fear of precipitating war. It also made the SovietUnion less cooperative and less willing to compromise, for fear of seemingweak.“94
Why did Stalin‘s gamble succeed? Why was he somuch more skillful in defus-ing American atomic diplomacy than he was in conducting h is own oreign pol-icy during this period? Espionage certainly had some thing‘ o do w ith it: th espies apparently did detect, a nd convey to Moscow, the m ost sensitive secret of
the early United States nuclear program, which was how unimpressive thenation’s nuclear capabilities actually were. Stalin could take certain risks-theCzech coup, the Berlin blockade, the authorization to Kim 11-sung to attackSouth Korea-because he knew that th e United States did not yet have thecapacity to attack and be sure of vanquishing the Soviet Union, even in the
V
The Truman administration responded to the Soviet bomb test in much thesame way that Stalin had absorbed th e news from Alamogordo, Hiroshima andNagasaki four years earlier. Although each side had known of the other‘s workon atomic weapons, confirmation of an actual capability, in each instance,came sooner tha n expected. Even if th e timing’could have been anticipated, the
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100 We Now Know Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 101
psychological impact could hardly have been. The Americans had guessed that
it would take the Russians anywhere from five to twenty years to get the bomb,
but they had fallen into the bad habit of pushing their range of estimates for-
ward each year,98so that the revelation that the USSR had managed it in four
could not but be a shock-very much like the one the Russians had felt, despite
their excellent intelligence sources, in the summerof 1945.President Truman's
initial reaction to the fact that there were now two nuclear powers also paral-
leled earlier Soviet behavior: he denied tha t anything significant had changed.
"The eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be
expected," he assured the nation. "This probability has always been taken in to
account by US."^ i
But Truman, unlike Stalin, did not-perhaps in a democracy could not-feign
unconcern for very long. By early 1950, he had taken several steps to deal
with the new situation, the combined effects of which were simultaneously
to increase and decrease reliance on nuclear weapons. He thereby produced a
muddle, not a strategy. The President and his advisers were as uncertain about
what they could actually do with nuclear weapons when they lef t office in 1953
as they had been in 1949.
The first stage in the American adjustment to a bipolar nuclear world was to.
expand the production of atomic bombs, something that would have happened
even if there had been no Soviet test in August 1949. Technical breakthroughs
were making it possible to build more powerful weapons with smaller amounts of
fissionable material, just as budget constraints were forcing the Pentagon to rely
increasingly on its atomic capabilities. All that t he Soviet atomic explosion did
here was to accelerate that process: there had been only about 200weapons in the
American arsenal at the time it took place; there would soon be many more.'m
The second American adjustment was more dramatic. Under pressure from
some-but by no means all- of the atomic scientists, Concerned about the con-
sequences if he did not go ahead and the Soviet Union did, President Truman
authorized research at the end of January 1950on a new and far more powerful
form of weapon based on nuclear fusion, not fission. American physicists had
understood the theoretical possibility of such a "super-bomb" since 1942.
Whether because they found the implications appalling, as some did, or because
of uncertainty over how to proceed, as was the case with others, the scientistshad maintained, as McGeorge Bundy has put it, a "benign conspiracy of silence
on the subject." The President himself apparently knew nothing of it until
October 1949.101
Despite serious disagreements among his advisers,lo2 Truman had little diffi-
culty deciding to build such a weapon once he understood that the Russians
could also do so. International control, he believed, was no longer feasible. His
suspicions of Stalin now equaled those the Kremlin leader had held of him four
and a half years earlier, when Stalin had ordered his own all-out effort to con-
struct an atomic bomb. There could be no assurance that the Russians would
refrain from practicing thermonuclear diplomacy if they possessed thermo-
nuclear weapons and the Americans did not. Everybody hbd predicted the end
-
of the world when he decided to aid Greece and Turkey, Truman commented as
he signed the announcement, on 31January 1950, that the United States would
build a hydrogen bomb. "[BJut we did go ahead, and the world didn't come to
an end. [It] would be the same case here."lo3
The final element in Truman's response to the Soviet atomic bomb was, how-
pver, an attempt to de-emphasize the utility of nuclear weapons altogether. NSC-
68, drafted during the late winter and early springof 1950, tacitly acknowledged
how hard it would be to find military purposes for these new instruments ofwarfare by making the case for a massive buildup of conventional forces, what-
ever the budgetary implications. It was imperative, insisted the document's
authors-Paul Nitze most influential among them-"to increase as rapidly as
possible our general air, ground and sea strength and that of our allies to the
point where we are militarily not so heavily dependent o n atomic weapons."
NSC-68 questioned neither the increase in the production of fission weapons
nor the decision to build the hydrogen bomb. But it did, for the first time, raise
the issue of how believable nuclear threats would be in a world with more than
one nuclear power. The danger was "piecemeal aggression against others,
counting on ou r unwillingness to engage in atomic war unless we are directly
attacked." The risk was "having no better choice than to capitulate or predpi-
tate a global war."lW What this argument implied, therefore, was a double para-
dox: as nuclear weapons became more numerous and more powerful, they alsobecame less usable; but as nuclear weapons became less usable, one needed
more of them to deter others who possessed them. Logic, in this field, was not
what it was elsewhere.
There was at the time, and has been since, a good deal of agonizing over
whether the American decisions of 1949-50 set off a new and even more lethal
arms race, thus closing off any possibility of a renewed effort at international
control.1o5 nsofar as the hydiogen bomb is concerned, though, the evidence is
now quite clear: the Russians began work on their own thermonuclear device
before the Americans did. For whatever reason-whether the nature of an
authoritarian societyordifferences n scientific culture or both-the distinction
between fission and fusion weapons never carried the weight within the Soviet
Union that it did in the United States.'" Andrei Sakharov, who more than any
other individual developed the Swiet "super," put the matter bluntly shortlybefore his death:
The Soviet government (or, more properly, those in power: Stalin, Beda, and com-pany) already understood the potential of the new development, and nothing couldhave dissuaded them from going forward with its development. Any U.S.movetoward abandoning or suspending work on a thermonuclear weapon would have
been perceived either as a cunning, deceitful maneuveroras evidenceof stupidityorweakness. In any case, the Soviet reaction would have been the same: to avoid a pas-sible trap, and to exploit the adversary's folly at the earliest opportunity.107
"The decision to develop the hydrogen bomb was seen as a logical next step,"
the most careful scholar of Soviet nuclcar history has concluded, "and occa-
sioned none of the soul-searching that took place in the United States."*m
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Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 103
Psychological effects, though, required different measurements: these the
military staffs left to their political superiors. Atomic bombs were terror
weapons as well as strategic weapons, and it was precisely their efficiency that
was so terr ifying-as the Japanese, more than anyone else, had reason t o know.
The only individual ever to have ordered the military use of atomic bombs
understood this from the start. Truman never thought it possible to separate
physical and psychological considerations when it came t o these new methods
of conducting war, and insisted on treating them as revolutionary for thatreason. No stranger to the uses of terror, Stalin too thought about the bomb in
psychological terms: hence his own form of "atomic diplomacy," which depre-
cated the importance of the weapon even as he was making the most desperate
efforts to obtain it; hence his own fears, once he had it, that he might be even
less secure.
How one estimates the outcome of a Soviet-American war fought, say, in
1950depends therefore upon how one balances physical versus psychological
effects. In physical terms, the two superpowers were relatively evenly-if asym-
metrically-matched. One can imagine a tiger versus shark standoff, rather like
that between the French and the British during the Napoleonic Wars, in which
dissimilar military capabilities could have kept each belligerent, for some time,
from getting at and hence prevailing against the other. But that would have
required steady nerves indeed o n both sides. The psychological consequencesofa Russian Blitzkrieg crashing through to the English Channel, or of just a fewatomic bombs wiping out Moscow or Leningrad, are much more difficult to
guess.
Time, though, was not on the Russians' side: the growing American atomic
stockpile was gradually narrowing the gap between the physical and the psy-
chological. It might indeed have been difficult o defeat the Soviet Union with
only 200 atomic bombs, but we know now, and Stalin's spies may well have
allowed him to know then, that the United States had 299weapons by the end
of 1950, 438by 1951, nd 841 by 1952.The Russians during the last year of
Stalin's life had only about fifty atomic bombs, or an approximate 17-1 disad-
vantage.**"The Soviet attainment of a physicul atomic capability, therefore, can
hardly have provided Stalin much psychological reassurance. Like Truman, he
must have wondered, having got them, just what good such weapons actuallywere.
102 We Now Know
VI
Despite the fact that two great powers now possessed atomic bombs, despite the
projects both now had to develop thermonuclear weapons, the feasibilityof war
itself was not yet in question. Well into the 195Os,military planners in both
Moscow and Washington clung to the reassuring notion-if reassurance could
have meaning in such a context-that World War 111 should it ever come
about, need not differ all that much from World War 11.
Old paradigms persist long after the conditions that gave rise to them have
ceased to exist,*- and t is clear now that Soviet and American war pfanning -reflected this tendency. Holloway has documented striking parallels in the way
strategists on both sides tried to adapt to the unfamiliarityof atomic bombs by
imposing familiarityon hem: when one confronts an abyss, it is perhaps nat-
ural to want t o minimize its depth. Both assumed the useof such weapons in
any new world war, but neither regarded them as likely to be decisive.
Asymmetries in conventional capabilities-the Red Army's substantial , though
not overwhelming, ground force superiority n Europe, the United States' naval
and air predominance-would, the planners expected,locka future war into the
pattern of the last one. The Russians would occupy most of Europe, probably
also parts of the Middle Fast and Northeast Asia. The United States and i ts sur-viving allies would rely, first, upon strategic bombing, and only much later on
invasions to try to retake these territories. Still for the most part safe from attack
because the Russians lacked an effective long-range bombing capability and
possessed only a rudimentary navy, the American "arsenal" would provide the
munitions and much of the manpower necessary to accomplish these tasks, as
it had in 1917-18 and 1941-5.Traditional, not nuclear, capabilities would
determine which side prevailed in the end.110
Given the decisiveness with which just two atomic bombs had forced Japan's
surrender, these attitudes might seem antiquated, even ostrich-like. But it was
not all that clear to either Russian or American military experts that the physi-
cal effects of atomic weapons were all that revolutionary. Soviet observers who
inspected the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as those who witnessed
the 1946Bikini tests, found the power of the new weapon awesome, but theydid not regard it as so powerful as to render war itself, or the possibility of sur-
vival in war, obsolete.111 Some Americans who saw the evidence first-hand
came to similar conclusions. Nitze, for example, noted tha t earlier firebomb
raids against Tokyo and other cities had been at least as devastating: the signif-
icance of atomic bombs lay in their efficiency, not their implications for the
future of warfare.112 Moreover, widely dispersed Soviet targets would hardly
resemble those in Japan. Holloway has pointed out that during the first fourmonths of the war with Germany in 1941, he Russians had sustained casualties
and physical destruction exceeding the Americans' estimates of the damage all
their approximately 200 atomic bombs in 1949 could have produced. Soviet
intelligence at the time, it appears, made similar ca l cu l a t i ~ hs .~ ~ ~
VII
The outbreak of fighting in Korea inJune 1950 rovided the first hard evidence.
The Korean War demonstrated how awkward it would be to use atomic bombs
even in the most desperate military circumstances: from this perspective, they
proved to be irrelevant to the outcome of that conflict. But from another per-spective they were of critical importance, for Korea determined how hot wars,
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104 We Now Know Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 105
claimed blithely two months later, only equaled "two o three thousand tons of
TNT."122Chinese officers in Korea were told that-such bombs were "not for
actual combat use," and one journal confidently assured its readers that these
weapons would annihilate anyone who tried t o use them.'=
Even as Mao minimized American atomic bombs, though, he expected the far
mo re primitive Soviet nuclear arsenal to intimidate the United States. The Sino-
Soviet alliance, in his mind, always had the purpose of deterrfng he Americans:
now it would prevent them from employing their most powerful weapons inKorea. "It is the United States who should be afraid of using atomic bombs
against us," a Chinese press editorial proclaimed shortly before Ma0 ordered
intervention there, "because its densely concentrated industries are more
vulnerable to serious damage by Soviet nuclear re ta li at l~ n. "' ~~hether the
Chairman believed in this early form of "extended deterrence" or was simply
seeking to reassure nervous subordinates is difficult to say. Significantly,
though, Chinese leaders were assuring each other as late as the fall of 1952that
the Americans would not use anything more powerful than tactical nuclear
weapons in Korea because "the United States Is under great pressure of world
opinion and is also deterred by possible Soviet nuclear retaliation."lS It is also
worth noting that Mao saw no need to begin his own bomb development pro-
ject until after the Russians made it clear, during the first Quemoy-Matsu crisis
two years later, that they would not risk war with the Americans to help theChinese regain Taiwan.lz6 Only when Mao realized how small and leaky the
Soviet nuclear umbrella was did he became uncomfortable under it.
But it is American attitudes about nuclear weapons in Korea that are the most
difficult to explain. Because Soviet capabilities werk still so rudimentary, th e
United States retained an effective atomic monopoly at the time the war broke
out.12' The defeats American troops suffered in the wake of th e initlal North
Korean attack dnd subsequent Chinese intervention were as humiliating as any
in the nation's military history.IZ8 he taboo on th e use of nuclear weapons In
limited wars-indeed the very notion of a "limited" war itself-had not yet
taken root: he Korean War defined these principles, but there was little reason
to expect, when it broke out, that its conduct would reflect thern.lZ9 That it did
so stemmed from what the world's most experienced nuclear power learned
about the kind of warfare its new weapons had now made possible.
The Truman administration tried to use its atomic superiorityadvantageously
in Korea, but never succeeded. One problem was the absence of appropriate tar-
gets. Atomic bombs had originated, after all, within the con text of World War
I1strategic bombing campaigns: hey were meant for use against indusMal facil-
ities, transportation networks, and military strongpoints, not for interdicting
peasant armies picking their way along mountain trails with little more than
what men could carry on their backs. It was not at all clear that atomic bomb-
ing, in such a war, would produce decisive results: the enemy might keepCorn-
ing, and so obviousa demonstrat ion of the bomb's ineffectivenesscould impair
its credibility elsewhere.130As a remarkably well-informed Soviet intel ligence
report put it in January 1953:
during the Cold War, were to be fought. The rule quickly became that neither
the United States nor the Soviet Union would confront the other directlyoruse
all available force; each would seek instead to confine such confrontations
within the theaters in which they had originated. This pattern of tacit
cooperation among bitter antagonists could hardly have emerged had it no t
been for the existence, on both sides, of nuclear weapons.
The caution the Soviet Union showed during the Korean War is understand-
able. Stalin had indeed been imprudent in allowing Kim 11-sung to attack SouthKorea, but he was prudent to the point of hyper-cautiousness once it became
clear th at his actions had provoked an unexpeded American mil itary response.
The Soviet Union had few if any atomic bombs available at the time the Wac
broke out, and no feasible means of delivering them upon American targets.Il5
Surely Stalin had this deficiency in mind when he warned the North Koreans,
before their invasion, that they would have to look to the Chinese for help if
the United States did intervene; surely it explains his statements to the Chinese,
after the Inchon landing, that the Soviet Union was not yet ready to fight a third
world war; surely it accounts for his willingness to tolerate a North Korean
defeat and an American military presence within striking distance of
VladivostokIl6 surely it influenced the extraordinary lengths to which Stalln
went to conceal what we now know to have been the Soviet air force's exten-
sive involvement in Korea in support of Chinese and North Korean troops.117The Chinese, less knowledgeable than the Russians about atomic bombs, were
more willing to fight the nation that had invented them. Their sacrifices in the
end-not the Soviet attainment of a nuclear capability-prevented Stalin's
worst fears of what might happen o n the Korean peninsula from coming to
pass.
Chinese thinking about nuclear weapons was strikingly inconsistent. On the
one hand, Mao Zedong had long ago dismissed the atomic bomb as "a paper
tiger which the US reactionaries use to scare people."118 His concerns about
Americans invading China had focused on the use of convent ional forces,
although he acknowledged that nuclear weapons might be employed. In either
case, technological superiority would mean little because the Chinese could
always fall back upon their enormous manpower reserves: "As long as the green
mountains are there, one need not worry about After the Korean
War began Mao went out of his way to taunt the Americans-less than coher-
ently-abo ut their nuclear impotence:
We will not allow you to use the atomic bomb. But if you insist on using it, you mayuse it. You can follow the way you choose to go, and we will go our own way. Youcan use the atomic bomb. I willrespond with my hand grenade. I will catch the weakpoint on your part, hold you, and finally defeat you.1m
" w e cannot but allow them to use it because we do not have [the bomb] and
thus we are in no position to stop them," Mao admitted to his Politburo on 4
August. But "we are not afraid, and we just have to get prepared."121 Part of the
preparation involved deprecation: American atomic weapons, the Chinese press
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106 We Now Know
m h e U.S. milita ry leaders are not c onvin ced of th e practicality of using th e atomicbomb in Korea. They are afraid that, if the use of atomic weapons does not e nsurethe real preponderance of the United States, a final blow will be dea lt to U.S. pres-tige. What's more, in this case they believe that the existing U.S. stockpile of atomicweapons would considerably lose its importance as a means of intimid ati0n .1~~
Better not to use the atomic bomb at all, in short, than to run the risk that its
use might fail to produce the intended result.
It was also the case that, despite their nuclear superiority, American officialsstill worried about war with the Soviet Union. The primary concern here was
indeed t he Sino-Soviet Treaty, which obligated th e Russians to come to Ch ina'sdefense in case of attack. Use of the b omb against Mao's troops inside Korea or
against their supply facilities in M anchuria might bring th e USSR in to th e con-flict: there was little awareness in Washing ton of how badly Stalin wanted to
avoid such an outcome. If war did come, the Soviet air force would be able to
bomb Japan or South Korea; even more dangerously, the fighting could spreadto more vital-but still vulnerable-regions like Europe or the Middle East, aprospect that would tu rn th e Korean struggle into a sideshow.13zThe treaty Mao
and Stalin signed, then, achieved the deterrence they had hoped for. At thesame time the advantage the United States held over the Soviet Union innuclear weapons and delivery capabilities counted, in this instance, for very
little.133Yet another difficulty grew out of the features that distinguished atomic
weapons from all others in the first place. Truman himself claimed not to havelost sleep over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bu t there is ampleevidence to suggest that he hoped never again to have to make a comparable
decision. As long as a ny other coun try+? spec ially the Soviet Union-had
nuclear capabilities the United States would have to have them , but th at by n omeans implied automatic use in future wars. "We will never use [t he bomb]again if we can possibly help it," the President had promised privately in
1949.1s4 Military professionalism, paradoxically, may also have discouraged
nuclear use: soldiers have often felt psychological resistance-at times evenmoral abhorrence-toward technologies that threaten t o alter familiar ways of
fighting.135Such instincts could have had something to do with why the JointChiefs of Staff found it so difficult to identify appropriate targets for atomicbombing in Korea.
But even if Truman a nd his generals had been comfortable with the idea of
employing nuclear weapons there, allies would not have been. The militaryeffort in Korea was, after all, a multinational enterprise fought under the UnitedNations flag, a fact which did-as Stalin may have anticipatedl36-inhibitAmerican freedom of action. When the President let slip at a November 1950press conference that the use of nuclear weapons in Korea had always been"under consideration," alarmed Europeans made it clear that the price the
United States would pay if i t took such action would include allied solidarity,not just on th e Korean peninsula but elsewhere as well.'3Z Thanks again t o theinvolvement of his spy, Maclean, in to psecr et Anglo-American discussions of
Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold Wa r 107
this issue in Washington the following month, Stalin was almost certainlyaware of its importance.lJ8So what did the Truman administration actually do with nuclear weapons
during the Korean War? It used that conflict to justify a massive rearmamenteffort, following th e guidelines of NSC-68, that significantly boosted American
puclear and conventional capabilities. It repeated the 1948 deployment of B-
29s-a tomic -cap able this time, but without atomic bombs-to British bases, aswell as to American facilitieson Guam. Following the firing of General Douglas
MacArthur in the spring of 1951 it even sent nuclear weapons to accompanythis latter group of bombers, but then quickly moved them back to the UnitedStates. It spoke periodically of expanding the w ar int o China, w ith th e implica-
tion that it might use nuclear weapons there; at no point did it explicitly
threaten such use, thoug h, whether in Korea or And that, as far aswe now know, is it: the Truman administration took no further action, despitethe fact that its superiority over its sole nuclear rival was greater than it would
ever be again.
VIII
Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, Jo hn Foster Dulles, did not a tfirst share Truman's uncertainty about what one might do with nuclear
weapons. Dulles had called loudly during the 1952 campaign for a "policy of
boldness" that would make American military power "a deterrent of war insteadof a mere means of waging war after we got into it," an d by the time of the elec-tion h e had persuaded an initially skeptical Eisenhower tha t only reliance on
nuclear weapons would make containment work over the long haul at a reason-able cost. The Korean War was dragging on inconclusively, both men believed,
because Truman had failed to use allof the strength available to end it. The new
administration was determined, as quickly as possible, to do better.1mEisenhower and Dulles remembered having threatened the use of nuclear
weapons in Korea if th e fighting there continued; t hey convinced themselves
that such threats had indeed induced the North Koreans and the ChineseCommunists to sign the armisticeof J uly 1953 . " w e were prepared for a much
more intensive scale ofwarfare," Dulles recalled several mon ths later. "[we] ha d
already sent the means to the theater for delivering atomic weapons. Thisbecame known to the Chinese through their good intelligence sources and infact we were not unwilling that t hey should find out." W hen asked yean later
why the Chinese accepted an armistice in Korea, Eisenhower responded
bluntly: "Danger of an atomic war."141It is much less clear in retrospect, though, th at cause and effect corresponded
this closely. The National Security Council did discuss the possibirityof usingnuclear weapons in Korea during th e first few month s of the Eisenhower admin-istration. T he president him self is on record as having described such devices as
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108 We Now Know
”simply another weapon in our arsenal,” while Dulles stressed the need to breakdown th e “false distinction”-promoted, he darkly noted, by Moscow-thathad set “atomic weapons apart from all other w eapons as being in a special cat-
egory.” But the administration was no more precise than its predecessor inthreatening actual use in Korea while th e fighting was still going on. Its mostexplicit warnings came after the armistice, and in the context of how it wouldrespond to a violation. Eisenhower did authorize the transfer of completedbombs to th e military for overseas deployment; this happened only on he eveof the armistice and as part of a general shift in procedures for handling nuclearweapons, though, not- as Dulles later cla ime d-a s part of a scheme to apply
pressure on the C hinese. Plans for nuclear use during t he final month: of th e
Korean War were, as the histo rian Roger Dingman h as written, “ more discursivethan decisive.“*42
Nor is there evidence that they impressed the Chinese Communists. Theauthorities in Beijing did carefully monitor Eisenhower’s campaign statements
calling for more aggressive strategies in Korea, but-still confiden t tha t the
Soviet atomic bomb would deter the Americans-they interpreted these a s pre-
saging intensified amphibious operations, not a nuclear offensive.1*’ Whenasked years later about their reaction to American nuclear threats in Korea,Chinese officials denied ev en having heard of them. If Dulles did intend the
transfer of atomic weapons and their means of delivery as a signal t o Beijing, itwas one the intended recipients apparently missed.144Why, the n, did th e Korean War end ? Because Stalin died, or so t now appears.
It is easy enough for us in retrospect to see how tha t conflict damaged Sovietinterests;l45 but the aging Kremlin autocrat did n ot view th e situation similarly.
He had worried in the fall of 1950 that the war might expand to involve theSoviet Union. He played a major role in setting up cease-fire negotiations
between the North Koreans, the Chinese, and th e United Nations command inJune 1951, presumably as a way of lessening that It may be that an
increasingly inflexible United States negotiating position, especially with respectto th e forced return of Chinese an d North Korean prisoners-of-war, prolonge d
these negotiations and therefore the fighti11g.1~’But it does not follow from all
of this that Stalin was eager to end the Korean War: indeed, new evidence
strongly suggests that once the battlefront had stabilized, he was keen to keepthe conflict going. “frlhe war in Korea should not be speeded up,“ he cabled Maoin June 1951. It could even be a useful learning experience for the Chinese,
since a drawn out war, in the first place, gives the possibility to th e C hinese troopsto study contemporary warfare on the field of battle and i n the seco nd place shakesup th e Truman regime in America and harms the m ilitary prestige of the Anglo-A merican t r oo ~ s . 1 ~ ~
The Chinese and the North Koreans, Stalin instructed Mao the following
November, should c ontin ue “using flexible tactics in the negotiations” but atthe same time ”pursue a hard line, n ot showing haste and, not displaying inter-est in a rapid end to th e negotiation^."'^^
Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War 109
Kim 11-sung was co mpla ining , by July 1952, that “the enemy almost withoutsuffering any kind of losses constantly inflicts on us huge losses in manpow erand material values.”i5o Even then, th ough , Stalin saw no reason to bring the
war to an end. “The North Koreans,” he told Zhou E nlai the following month,“have lost nothing, except for casualties that they suffered during the war.”
Jhere had of course been ”many” of these-Stalin said not hln g of Chinese
casualties-but th e war had paid off because it had revealed the Americans’weakness:
Americans are merch ants. Every American soldier is a speculator, occupied with buy-ing and selling. Germans conquered France in 20 days. It’s already been two years,and [the] USA has still no t subdu ed little Korea. Wha t kind of strength is that?America’s primary weapons . . . are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise.They want to subjugate the world, yet the y can not subdue little Korea.
“NO,”Stalin insisted, “Americans don’t know how to fight. . They are pinning
their hopes on th e atom bo mb and air power. But one c annot win a war withthat.”151
Perhaps because they had a clearer sense of Soviet long-term interests, Stalin’ssuccessors took a less sangu ine -an d sanguinary-view. Eager to explore thepossibilities for relaxing tensions with the West, they saw Korea as the obvious
place to start.152Within two weeks of the old dictator’s death In March 1953,
the Soviet Council of Ministers informed both Mao an d Kim of its view
that it would be incorrect to continue the line on this question which has been fol-
lowed until now, without making alterations in tha t line which correspond to thepresent political situation and w hich ensue from the deepest interests of our peoples,the peoples of the USSR, China and Korea, who are interested in a firm peace andhave always sought an acc eptablepath toward the soonest possible conclusion of thewar in Korea.IS3
Or , in less convoluted language, whatever Stalin’s interest in making war, theywere ready to make peace.
The exhausted North Koreans did no t object, nor did t he Chinese: the SovietUnion all along had provided less military assistance than they ha d hoped for-and had insisted that they pay for it. Their economy was dangerously over-
stretched.Is4 Stiff United Nations resistance had long since forced Mao toabandon his grandiose plans for driving the Americans off the Korean penin-sula: a 1954 Pentagon estimate placed the ratio of Chinese to American casual-
ties at ten to one-surely an exaggeration-but the Chinese themselves haveacknowledged a three-to-one imbalance.lsS And the Eisenhower administra-tion’s public rhe toric may have given Beijing at least a vague sense that if it didnot accept a n armistice they might so on face a wider war, even if no t a nuclearone.Is6
Mao had the option of treating a military stalemate as a victory: as an author-itarian leader, he could impart greater malleability to the meaning of wordsthan could his democratic counterparts in t he West. Even if his initial victorieshad given him delusions of grandeu r-rather like MacArthur’s unde r similar
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110 We Now Know
circumstances-his fundamental objective in Korea had been to demonstrate
that the Chinese people had "stood up" to the Western imperialists. "This time
* we have really felt out the US armed forces," Mao boasted in September 1953.
"If you do not come into contact with [them], you might be afraidof them. We
fought with them for thirty-three months, and we have become thoroughly
acquainted with them. US mperialism is not such an awesome thing, it is just
what is, and that's all."157
So did nuclear weapons play any significant role in th e Korean War? At on e
level, the answer has to be:not at all. It is difficult to show that the North and
South Koreans, the Chinese, orthe Americans and their allies fought the ground ,
war in Korea any differently from the way they would have if nuclear Geapons
had no t even existed. The gap between the power of such weapons and their
practical applications was so great as to render them useless, which is why Mao
could get away with treating them in exactly this way.
At another level, though, nuclear weapons were supremely significant, for the
Korean War could hardly have remained what it w a s a limited war-in their
absence. Despite Stalin's posturing before Zhou Enlai, we can assume that he
did not really share Mao's official view of American atomic bombs as paper
tigers.158 "How he quivered!" Khrushchev ater recalledof Stalin. "He was afraid
of war. He knew that we were weaker than the United States. We had only a
handful of huclear weapons, while America had a large arsenalof
nuclear
arm~."~59isenhower certainly saw this: "They must be scared as hell," he
remarked of the new Soviet leaders just prior t o the Korean armistice.IW
But the Americans also behaved cautiously. Their awareness of a Sino-Soviet
Treaty linked to a Soviet nuclear capability-primitive though it was-de terred
them from expanding the war into China despite their nuclear superiority; it
may also have kept them from making an issue of Soviet air involvement in
Korea, despite what must have been abundant evidence of it.161Washington
too feared what a wider war in a nude ar age might bring. "You must be prepared
to use force in such a way as not to involve the use of ultimate force," Acheson
later explained. "If you don't limit it, the world is gone."162
It was in this sense, then, that the new weapons proved their worth. They
frightened both sides into thinking twice-indeed into thinking repeatedly-
about the risks of escalation. Apart from common sense, never a n entirely reli-able mechanism, the pre-nuclear age had had few means to keep small conflicts
from dragging great powers into big wars. Even as they multiplied potential
levels of violence, nuclear weapons reinforced rationality, even prudence, even
among antagonists with no other basis for mutual trust.163
Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold Wa r 111
tional weapon-on a Pacific atoll that proved too fragile to survive the blast.
Little celebration accompanied this final technological accomplishment of the
Truman administration, though, and the President himself, as if ashamedby t,
would not even announce the test publicly for another two weeks.1- Few of
those who had favored building hydrogen bombs now expected them to pro-
Vide any lasting advantage over the Soviet Union, a judgment quickly con-
firmed when the Russians detonated their own primitive version -also not an
operational weapon-just nine months later, on 12August 1953.'= By the end
of 1955, oth sides would have fully functional thermonuclear bombs as well aslong-range bombers from which to drop them; both were on the way to devel-
oping missiles capable of delivering such weapons on each other's territory
almost instantaneously. The United States would retain quantitative and quali-
tative superiority in nuclear weapons for years to come, but the age of mutual
vulnerability-the ability of each side to inflict catastrophic damage upon the
other-had clearly arrived.
The American monopoly over nuclear weapons, while it lasted, yielded unim-
pressive results. Stalin and Mao quickly sensed that the way to defuse this dan-
ger was to deprecate it, to treat it as a "paper tiger" whose capacity to frighten
people depended solely upon their willingness to be frightened. It was critically
important, as Stalin insisted, never to show "weak nerves," even if -a s he clearly
did to the day he die d-one suffered from them. Both dictators practiced a
strategy Kennan had once recommended to the United States and its Western
European allies for confronting Soviet conventional force superiority :
We are like a man who has let himself into a walled garden and finds himself alonethere with a dog with very big teeth. The best thing for us to do is surety to try to
establish, as between the tw o of us, the assumption that the teeth have nothing
whatsoever to do with our mutual rela tionshi pthat they are neither here nor there.
If the dog shows no disposition to assume that it is otherwise, why should we raisethe subject and invite attention to the disparity?'-
Why, though, did th e American nuclear dog not bite? Or bark? Or at least derive
some benefit from its expensively acquired teeth?
Democracy surely had something to do with i t. We will never know for cer-
tain what Stalin or Mao might have done with a nuclear monopoly, but it Seems
reasonable to assume that they would have brushed aside the competingdomestic priorities, the concerns about civil-military relations, the worries
about what allies would say, and-most particularly-the moral qualms that
afflicted the Truman administration and, in time, Eisenhower's as well.
Authoritarians end to wield power authoritatively.
As the only American president to enjoy a nuclear monopoly, one might have
expected Harry S.Truman himself, of all people, to have been more assertive.
That he was not has been taken as reflecting an inadequate understanding of
nuclear strategy: "Maturity of strategic thinking had yet to arrive in
Washington," two recent historians of this subject have concluded; for the
Truman administration, nuclear weapons provided only "a convenient means
to avoid tough decisions and painful choices."167
IX
On 1 November 1952, he United States rearranged a small portion of the
earth's surface by detonating the first thermonuclear dace-no t an opera-
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112 We Now Know
Perhapsso.But one m ight also argue that T ruman was more mature than mostothers at th e time because he saw, almost from the start, that nuclear weaponswere going to change the meaning of "strategy" itself. That word implies the
calculated relationship of means to ends; but Truman persistently maintainedthat in a nuclear age such calculations were no longer possible. When a n adviserreminded h im in October 1945 that h e had a n atomic bomb up his sleeve, thePresident acknowledged this but com mented: "I am no t sure that it can ever be
used." '= " w a r has undergone a technological change which makesi t a very
different thing from what it used to be," the President explained seven yearslater in his final State of the U nion message:
The war of the future would be one in which ma n could extingu ish millions of livesat one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achieve-ments of the pa st- an d destroy the very structure of a civilization that has beenslowly and painfully built up thro ugh h undred s of g enerations. Such a war is not apossible policy for rational men.
Truman concluded by revealing what h e would say to Stalin-who retained his
belief in t he eventual inevitability of war through the final weird mo nths of hislife1q9-if the tw o should ever meet aga in, face to face:
You claim belief in Lenin's prophecy that on e stage in the developme nt of com-munist society would be war between your world and ours. But Lenin was a pre-
atomic man, who viewed society and history with pre-atomic eyes. Somethingprofound has happened since he m ote. War has changed its shape and dimension.It cannot now be a "stage" in the de velopment of anyth ing save ruin for your regimeand your homeland.*70
Little noticed at the time nor widely remem bered since,''' Trum an's Janu ary
1953 valedictory anticipated th e difficulties all of his successors would ha ve -a swould those elsewhere in the world w ho would come t o possess them-trans-lating the physical power of nuclear weapons into effective nstrume nts of state-
craft. The absence of coherent strategy in the Truman ad ministration, therefore,
may have demonstrated n ot so much lack of sophistication as an abunda nce of
it. Truman's nuclear education simply preceded that of everyone else.
-